whose demands Prussia, and at Aranjuez, before Within the past five years Spain has reached a period in which she ought to give a clear and definite solution to the problems which have grown out of her successive revolutions, and to conceive and work out a modus vivendi, the regulations of which shall contain something of the past with much of the progress to be desired for the future; such as the compact between modern Italy, for example, and the house of Savoy, between independent Hungary (that is, almost) and the house of Hapsburg, between Germany and re between the French democracy and the conservative public. It cannot be denied that such a transaction would disturb the lofty ideals of many a democrat, who having paid for his abstract conceptions cannot content his generous ambitions with anything less than absolute liberty. complete democracy and the radical republic. I am one of those who have dreamed of those gains (?) for the benefit of the country. But we must not take these dreams, whose indecisive outlines hover before us like the dawn of the future, for the highest degree of comparison with which to judge the present. We must turn the eyes of memory to the sad realities of the past, for in this case we have directly before us two realities which may be true terms of comparison and not the ideal, inaccessible and unrealizable extended in the vague ether where Utopian dreams flicker like ignis fatuii. Those who have seen an almost absolute monarchy, and to-day see a democratic monarchy, who once scarcely dared ex press their thoughts for fear of censure and to-day can write whatever they please; those who have once been called the Illegal party and who now see opened before them parliament and the government; those who have been debarred from the universities for proclaiming free will and the proper standard of science, and to-day have the right to teach whatever they be lieve and think; those who saw an intolerable Church united to an almost absolute State, crushing every expansion of the soul, and to-day know no limitation to the expression of their thoughts; those who have been indignant at slavery and the markets where human beings were bought and sold as in the days of old Nineveh and Babylon, and to-day know that there is not one slave under the Spanish flag, are well content with the work of the last forty years. They do not wish, in order to extend it outside of its rational limits, to frustrate it, when so many dangers threaten all our rights and so many retrogressions have fol audacious lowed close upon our too boldnesses, and our too rapid advances in the paths of continual progress. To proclaim such a mode of conducting what we politics, without selecting most need from the past and the present to give it a permanent reality, seems like trying to put together a machine according to pure mathematical formula without wishing to study and realize the coefficient of the real ity. But what living reality can surpass the abstract ideal? I do not know any relation so analogous to the existence between the ideal and the abstract as that existing between the earth and the sun. Without political reality, the ideal, like the earth without the sun, cannot exist. But, after having proclaimed this necessity for the ideal, there is no other remedy than to place the living realities at a certain distance from its flames, just as the planets are placed at a certain distance from the sun. If our earth should approach too near the sun, it would be dissolved in the glow ing heat of the latter; so, if we should try to bring reality too close to the pure ideal, it would immediately be shat tered. We cannot breathe in certaiu altitudes, neither can we realize a pure idea, except up to a certain limit. The periods of the greatest light and greatest incandescence of our globe were not adapted to human life. From The Spectator. THE CHARM OF LONDON. Lord Rosebery said the other day that he hoped London had been much more beautiful than it now is, when in the times of the Plantagenets and Tudors a great line of palaces along the banks of the Thames connected the city with Westminster, and that he hoped it might become again more beautiful than it now is, when our streets shall be "living storehouses of history" instead of long blanks of stucco, and he ventured to differ widely from Sir Walter Besant's assertion that London had never been more beautiful than it now is. And very likely Lord Rosebery is right, if we use the word "beautiful" in its ordi nary sense of that which delights the eye by its symmetry and fairness. There are certainly many Eastern cities,-Damascus, for instance, and Constantinople,-whose gardens and groves present a far more picturesque appearance than London can ever present with its huge population. For let the streets become "living storehouses of history" as much as they may, the vast crowds which now swarm through the mighty city will effectually drive the palaces more and more into the distance. But if, instead of the beauty of London, we should speak of the charm of London, we should be inclined to say that London had never wielded so great a charm as it does at the present Neither is a true and tangible reality time in spite of its long stretches of adapted to an ideal too ethereal and ardent. No social crime exists that has not originated from some one carrying to excess the most just principles, and trying to incorporate them within a limited and conditional reality. As hopes fulfilled lose the enchantment of their natural poesy, so is all progress realized in this sad world of ours, lost in the splendor of the pure ideal. From the Spanish of Emilio Castelar. Translated for THE LIVING AGE by Jean Raymond Bid well. stuccoed streets. For charm depends on the sense of power even more than on the sense of beauty. Michael Angelo exerts even a greater charm than Raffael, and Alexander a greater charm than Hannibal. So London in the nineteenth century, with its crowds of ordered and orderly labor, its storetreasures of houses of wealth, its learning, its mighty avenues of iron roads raying out to the ends of the river kingdom, and with the great which carries the ships of all nations to the sea, exerts a far mightier charm on the imagination at this end of the nineteenth century than it could ever have exerted before. London has, indeed, a mental atmosphere which presses with a far greater force on the mind than that with which the physical atmosphere presses on the body. No one can live in it without being sensibly stirred by the consciousness of force, of which the evidence streams in on one at every pore. There is a kind of magnetism in the mere proximity of so much energy and vivacity. The man who enters London from the country is sensible of a new stimulus and a clearer consciousness of what life means and what it may produce than he had before. All this exerts a spell which cannot be wielded by groves of dates and gardens of roses, nor even by stately piles of marble architecture. London in the times of the Plantagenets and Tudors, London as Sir Walter Scott imagined it during the later Stuarts, never possessed such a charm as is put forth by the vast city of the present day, where genius and skill and knowledge, and industry are all represented by hosts of minds acting in concert with each other to produce a result such as the world has not elsewhere to show. Even the thick air which so sadly impairs the beauty of London has sometimes had an im aginative charm of its own. Mr. Low ell used to say that there was nothing more delightful than the foggy sunsets of London, and Wordsworth felt its at traction when he said to Crabbe: Our haughty life is crowned with dark ness ster Bridge in the stillness of a summer dawn, he dwelt on the latent power of the vision even more than its mere beauty: Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep! mighty heart" beating so close to one, There is the charm of London, "that whether wakeful and active or still in slumber. And everything adds to that charm which, like the river, brings the whole force of it before you, partly by the contrast of its comparative tranquillity, its ever unhastening and un resting current, partly by the great and fro upon its bosom. Wordsworth felt justly enough that the bridges of London, which mark the break between the two great masses of population, and from which in comparative tranquillity you can get a view of the whole, are the very centres of charm which London exerts over the mind. From Westminster Bridge you command the very heart of the political life not merely of a great city, but could lay your hand on the main hisof a great nation, and feel as if you rush of commerce which it carries to the and passion. From London Bridge you torical scenes of centuries of strife command the very centre of mercanping in the lower part of the river, and tile London, see the masts of the shipthe great dome of St. Paul's towering over all that traffic as men's religion towers over their busy activities and Like London with its Own black eager hopes. And from Waterloo wreath, On which with thee, O Crabbe, forthlooking I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath. Nor is that the only testimony which Wordsworth,-a solitary-minded mau who lived chiefly amongst mountains and lakes, and cared nothing for the world,-gave to London, a testimony not called forth so much by its beauty as by its marvellous concentration of human force and life. In the famous sonnet on London seen from Westmin Bridge you command a view of both as it were,-necessary to enable you flood, you can no more realize the charm it has for the imagination, than a drowning man can realize the charm of the sea in which he is struggling for life. But when the throng is broken, even though it is always pouring its tide over the passage from one of the mighty fragments to the other, you can gaze upon the great tumult,or the great silence which was tumult a few hours ago and will be tumult again in a few more hours, and yet possess your own soul. After all then, the chief spell of London is in the life and energy which it seems to add, and probably does really add, to the mind which feels that spell. We know that an electric current will develop a parallel current in a wire some mile or so distant from it, and that a message may even be involuntarily transmitted in this way from a wire between stations at sea to a wire on land at a moderate distance. In the same way, the mere rush of energy around you in London seems to transmit a certain portion of itself to any mind which is at work in the heart of London, and to brace it up as it were to a tension. higher nervous London is like an electric bath to those who need that sort of reinvigorating stimulus; nor do the sordid streets impress you less in that respect,-perhaps even more on account of the greater mass of life that flows through them, -than the statelier streets. Lord Rosebery is quite right that the sordid streets make one melancholy when one reflects on the meanness of the life which they contain, on the squalor of the advertisements with which the poorer inhabitants are regaled, the misery of their want, and the unmitigated pangs which might be mitigated if the poor were not so near the very brink of destitution. But all that is a matter of reflection. When one does not reflect, the great tide of life that flows ceaselessly through the streets, adds not less, perhaps, as we have said, even more, to the impressiveness of London, than the richer and more comely life of the wealthier quarters. The great charm of London is in the magnitude and variety of its life, and the singular order which regulates it. To see the great tide of labor and organizing thought flow into London day by day in waves as sure and steady as those of the advancing tide, and then ebb again in the evening as the laborers and the organizers of labor rush back to their quiet homes, is even more impressive than to watch the flow and ebb of the sea on a line of beach. For we know how "the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon," but we do not know how it is that all these atoms of eager desire, and ingenious imagination, and restless self-will, are controlled constitute the mighty whole of a city in which there is as much constancy and order as there is fulness of life. so as to From Good Words. A FEAST DAY IN THE CANARIES. If you would see Orotava in its gayest and most distinctive mood, you should manage to be there for the feast of Corpus Christi. The hotels and every possible lodging in the Port and the Villa are crowded with the happiestlooking sight-seers come to see the famous carpet of flowers. I had been told that all the little streets, balanced between blue of sky and blue of sea, like Margery Daw's see-saw, in a perfect slant, would be covered with flowers. I could imagine the effect charming, but hardly an affair to bring people in boats across from the different isles, and send them up from Santa Cruz to Laguna in excited cavalcades. That was my error. It was quite a strange and surprising sight. Picture these engaging little streets showing the loveliest fancies in flowerleaves along their slopes, not loosely spread flowers, as I expected to see, but the leaves of millions upon millions of flowers of every gradation of hue, sorted and fitted closely in wooden compartments, and quaint devices and fancies built upon proximity with a painter's or a weaver's art. One street flying over a sunny landscape against had what looked like a real Oriental carpet with a Greek border in deep red and orange. The regularity of tracing and design was so correct, and the roses and buds, the leaves and stems were so perfectly the stiff ugliness of a carpet as to deceive the eye. When such colors unfamiliar in flowers as black, royal blue, or green were needed, the leaves were dyed. A charming effect was produced by a double row of flags of all nations intertwined with the colors of Spain along an entire street. The Union Jack, faithfully reproduced in all its brilliance, gave the spectator over-seas 'a homesick pang. There were many flags new to me, and these, I was told, belonged to the South American Republics and a variety of remote islands. The sombre Austrian flag in that flaunting mass of perfumed color had a peculiar air of majesty and isolation, but the Tricolor and the British flags harmonized quite jauntily with the red and yellow of Spain. Opposite the courtyard of a local aristocratic palace there was a picture that won all enthusiastic praises. You never passed it as long as the leaves retained their fictitious glory without its circle of gazing admirers. It was a life-size angel, most skilfully drawn and colored upon a background of blue and golden sky, a wider rim of purple sea. The angel had a mass of brilliant, reddish-golden hair, made out of nasturtium petals, I think; flesh-tinted rose-leaves gave a perfect suggestion of creamy cheeks; the leaves and lips were made of rose and violet eyes, and it is incredible with what skill the lashes and eyebrows were suggested with brown thorns. She wore floating garments of deep and bright red, and the lines of shadow were made of those blood-dark roses that look like plush. Her arms were bare, and she was dropping yellow sheaves upon the earth. The sea, as deep as the Egean, was made of the darkest violets I have ever seen, and light playing upon the ripples was the effect of here and there a dash of the paler Parma violet. When I had bestowed praise as lavish upon this work of art as even to satisfy the pride of the innocent townsfolk, they assured me that, beautiful as it was, it was still not so beautiful as the alfombra they made for the Infanta Eulalie to walk upon when she visited Orotava on her way to Chicago. "That was so beautiful," they said in ecstatic remembrance, "that she declined to tread upon it, saying that it would be a sin." had seen the completion of perhaps the greatest philosophic work in our literature. But the reader had become demoralized. He was not quite so gentle as he was. The morning paper, the evening paper, the weeklies, the monthlies, had all come between him and the big books. We preferred short cuts to the open road. A remedy is suggested by Dr. Conan Doyle: "It might be no bad thing," he said, "for a man now and again to make a literary retreat, as pious men make a spiritual one; to forswear absolutely for a month in the year all ephemeral literature, and to bring an untarnished mind to the reading of the classics of our language." Academy. |